Former Foe Colby Is Returning To Vietnam

November 24, 1994|By Knight-Ridder/Tribune.

HANOI — Onetime CIA Director William Colby, who directed one of the agency's most controversial and deadly covert operations during the Vietnam War, is about to return to the country for the first time in 23 years-as an investor.

But Colby, whose secret Phoenix Program assassinated an estimated 20,000 Viet Cong, hasn't yet received a visa from the Vietnamese government. Neither the Ministry of Foreign Affairs nor the Interior Ministry had been told about Colby's scheduled trip, according to a government official.

Colby is an investment-fund director hoping to capitalize on his onetime enemy's newly opened economy. He said Tuesday he applied for a visa through the "normal machinery" and that he doesn't foresee any problems getting it.

"They are opening up a great deal, really," said Colby, who declined to speculate on the reception he would get from the Vietnamese.

Colby plans to arrive in Hanoi on Dec. 4 and travel later to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, according to officials of the Vietnam Frontier Fund. Colby and the six other directors are scheduled to hold a party for several hundred guests Dec. 5. at a Hanoi landmark, the 83-year-old Opera House.

"I don't know (what to expect)," Colby said by telephone from his home in Washington. "It's up to them."

The visit would be Colby's first since 1971. "I just look forward to the Vietnamese people joining the rest of the world," he said.

Colby's war record is "totally irrelevant," said John Pike, chief investment officer for the fund in Ho Chi Minh City. "He's coming as a director of the fund. He's . . . one of our main directors. We are here to invest $50 million as quickly and as sensibly as we can."

Some other business people in Vietnam suggest that the government's willingness to entertain Colby would send a strong signal that, at least from the Vietnamese side, the wounds of the war are forgiven if not forgotten.

"If they let him in, that's the signal that anyone can come," said an American in Hanoi who was stationed in Saigon during the 1960s.

Beginning in 1959, Colby spent 12 years, off and on, in Vietnam running CIA operations. He was the CIA's station chief in Saigon, supervising both recruitment of Montagnard tribal people and the "strategic hamlet program," an attempt to relocate peasants into safe villages and sway them to the U.S. side.

But the most controversial chapter of Colby's tenure in Vietnam was the Phoenix Program, which was aimed at infiltrating and eradicating Viet Cong leaders and their sympathizers. An estimated 20,000 alleged Viet Cong were assassinated under the program, leading to a congressional investigation into charges of torture and assassination.

Colby was appointed director of the Central Intelligence Agency by President Richard Nixon in 1973. He was replaced in 1976 by George Bush.